15 April 2008

King Me!

I just got an email from last week's lecturer responding to my post. In his response, he denied all his previous logical fallacies, and instead gave me two "arguments from personal incredulity," one "moving the goalpost," a "slippery slope," a "false dichotomy," and several factual inaccuracies. He actually argued that the second law of thermodynamics proves that evolution is impossible (CLOSED SYSTEM! The entropy of a CLOSED SYSTEM increases! ΔG=ΔH-TΔS!). But that's not what this post is about.

Is there any point to arguing with someone who doesn't agree with you? I know I'm not going to change this guy's mind. And it's a one-on-one email debate right now, so no one else is listening. If I argue him, I waste my time. Hell, any reply I give now will just be a list of logical fallacies. I'm not going to win, he's not going to lose. But if I don't reply, he could see it as a sign of submission. It's like I'm arguing with a three-year-old about where clouds come from. What do you think? Is it worth it to argue?

4 comments:

42towels said...

I know that you've seen this comic.... since you're the one that showed it to me. But it's just all too applicable.
http://cectic.com/069.html
And as for arguing with someone you can't win against, there's always the slight possibility (but probably not in this case) that they'll bring up something you hadn't considered.

iamthebrillo said...

(hence the title of the post)

42towels said...

Yeah, I got that about five seconds after I commented. The slowly dawning, '.........oooohh.'

iamthebrillo said...

That's ok, people were asking me about the title anyways. I guess no one followed the links in my first post...